If you spend enough time around a woodshop, you eventually learn the magic of a jig.
A jig isn’t a commercial tool you buy in a shiny blister pack at the hardware store. It’s a custom fixture you build right on your own bench—out of scraps of maple or plywood—specifically designed to hold an awkward workpiece steady so you can make a repeatable, impossible cut without losing a finger.
You build a jig because off-the-shelf tools are either too generic to solve your exact problem, or so bloated with complicated attachments that setting them up takes longer than making the cut itself.
That is the foundation of how we incubate ventures at Camwyn & Co.
We don’t do speculative market research. We don’t build pitch decks chasing venture capital. If a problem doesn’t create real, frustrating friction in our own daily life, it doesn’t earn a spot on our bench.
The Multi-Schedule Tax Nightmare
Take ManyHats Ledger, for example.
For years, our household finances have looked less like a tidy corporate balance sheet and more like an obstacle course. On any given year, our tax return is juggling:
- Schedule C: Independent engineering management and consulting.
- Schedule F: Farm operations, feed receipts, and heritage livestock up in the North Country.
- Schedule E: Property, rentals, and physical assets.
If you’ve ever tried forcing that multi-entity reality into mainstream accounting software, you know the special flavor of dread it inspires.
The big legacy platforms want to treat you like a Fortune 500 enterprise. They want double-entry journals, chart-of-accounts hierarchies, and monthly subscription tiers that cost more than my first drill press. Meanwhile, the lightweight consumer apps assume you have exactly one W-2 job and a checking account.
The result? The dreaded Shoebox of Chaos.
Receipts pile up on the counter. The cognitive wall of dread grows higher every week. I don’t claim to have ADHD myself, though I occasionally tease Ivy that she has enough creative tangents for three households. But whether your brain is neurodivergent or simply overloaded by running four different operations, the effect is the same: when a tool is painful to use, you stop using it.
From a Quick Script to the Workbench
The very first version of ManyHats wasn’t a software company. It was a custom jig.
Earlier this year, staring down another tax season with a pile of unsorted papers, I cobbled together a rough script hooked into a spreadsheet just to survive without losing my mind. It wasn’t pretty, and there were no slick marketing pages. But it did one thing flawlessly: it let me throw mixed receipts into distinct buckets in seconds, tag the right tax schedule, and get back to work.
Over the months that followed, we stress-tested that prototype against real life. We refined the edges. We added OCR extraction and AI categorization so a blurry receipt from the feed store or a software subscription gets sorted with zero manual typing.
What started earlier this year as a rough shop jig on our own kitchen table quickly hardened into a proper tool—something clean, fast, and completely stripped of corporate bloat.
Why the Workshop Door Stays Unlatched
Which brings us to the other half of Camwyn & Co.
People often ask why we leave an open door for outside projects on our site—what we call The Next Thing.
It’s because the best collaborations happen the exact same way as our internal tools.
When you spend decades running farms, managing remote engineering teams, writing books, and building custom systems from scratch, you don’t just accumulate skills—you accumulate a shop full of well-tested jigs. You know where ideas get stuck. You know how easily a brilliant creative spark can get choked by operational friction, bloated software, or bad advice from people who have never actually built a thing with their own hands.
We don’t act like a traditional agency with slick slide decks and twelve account managers. We treat our studio like an atelier.
If you’re a founder, a creator, an operator, or someone sitting on a stubborn, unsolved problem that off-the-shelf solutions can’t seem to fix: bring it to the bench.
You don’t need a 40-page business plan. You just need a genuine spark, a real problem worth solving, and the willingness to look at the grain of the wood and ask: What kind of jig do we need to build to make this work?
Tools That Get Out of the Way
Whether we’re building an internal tool like ManyHats or partnering with someone on a brand-new venture, the philosophy doesn’t change.
We don’t build software to pitch to investors; we build things so people can get back to living their lives.
A good tool doesn't ask you to change how your brain works. It just holds the workpiece steady, makes the cut clean, and gets out of the way.
